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Marketing to patients out of patience

“Sure, I love waiting to be seen by a doctor who doesn't even bother to learn my name” said no one ever. Long waits in boring waiting rooms is one reason for patient discontent, but so is feeling like their time isn't valued and that no one cares about the lack of customer service for patients.

Any one of us who has had the experience of being in a hospital, or even of caring for a family member who was, can identify with the experiences depicted in these videos.

It doesn't have to be that way. That's the message that North Memorial Health, a healthcare system that operates two hospitals and 25 clinics in the Minneapolis area, is adopting for its new branding campaign created by BrandFire. The approach is to acknowledge that, while healthcare may be broken, it is working to fix it, and to humanize the healthcare experience.

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This is not an exhaustive list. It was inspired by a quick look at a company profile on Google +. I used to follow that company but just stopped because it clearly is not paying attention to its own posts. It was guilty of all 3 of these:

1. You only post self-promotion and nothing else.2. You don't respond to any of the comments on your posts, including those with direct questions.3. You have one guy post "Thanks a lot, [profile name]" on each post, which just makes it look like you hired someone not very bright to comment.

In other words, #DoingItWrongIf you have any other signs of doing social media wrong, please write them in the comments!

On December 18, 2015, President Obama signed off on the 2,000 plus page omnibus budget bill, that amounted to spending $1.8 trillion in a combination of government allocation and tax breaks. Among the items packed into this gargantuan package is the Cybersecurity Act of 2015, also known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). Set to stay in effect until September 30, 2025, it's a bill that will keep on giving for a decade. But not all regard it as a gift.
The bill had some vociferous opposition, most notably from the group called Fight for the Future. As late as December 16, the organization appealed for a veto on the law. Its campaign director, Evan Greer, declared that the bill is "a disingenuous attempt to quietly expand the U.S. government's surveillance programs, and it will inevitably lead to law enforcement agencies using the data they collect from companies through this program to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate more people, deepening injusti…

I've written for a content mill known as Examiner.com for years. The pay was exceedingly low, amounting to somewhere around $100 a year, but I had a lot of freedom and so wrote some of what I would have included on one of my personal blogs (not this one) in any case.

However, it's time to cut the content mill out of my life because there is no way I will agree to its new terms. Note that point #2 absolves them from any formula for payment -- even that fraction of a penny per view that it used to use and that #7 amounts to selling (for no specified amount other than the possibility of "exposure") the use of your work forever after to Examiner.

“EXAMINERS” INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR AGREEMENT AND LICENSE
Important - Read Carefully: This Examiners Independent Contractor Agreement and License (“Agreement”) is a legal agreement between you and AXS Digital Media Group, LLC d/b/a Examiner.com (“Examiner.com”) regarding the content you may choose to provide as an “Examiner,” as…